Jazz High Notes at UCSD : Music: Students learn the best of jazz under tutelage of a professor who is also a veteran player.

UC San Diego is probably best-known for its science and medical research, but its jazz program has nothing to be embarrassed about. Under the direction of veteran jazzman Jimmy Cheatham, it is gaining stature and attracting students who embrace lofty ambitions.

The program’s reputation has grown with its list of successful alumni, including saxophonist Hollis Gentry, jazz-band leader and sideman to guitarist Larry Carlton; Nathan East, bass guitar player for Eric Clapton; pianist Marshall Otwell, a frequent accompanist to singer Carmen McRae, and top New York jazz bassist Mark Dresser.

Playing in the jazz ensemble under Cheatham is perhaps the most valuable experience many jazz students are going to get, a chance to hone their talents under the watchful eye of a genuine master.

Raised on the classic jazz of the 1940s and 1950s, bass trombonist Cheatham passes the rudiments on to his young charges. At last week’s winter-quarter jazz concert in the school’s Mandeville Auditorium, the jazz ensemble (and several small-group offshoots) played the music Cheatham knows and loves: songs by Duke Ellington, Thad Jones, Frank Foster, John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk.

Cheatham, the only faculty member on campus who teaches jazz full time, puts the ensemble through its paces two nights a week, and the mood during these practice sessions is summed up by one word used often by his pupils to describe him: “Intensity!”

Watching him in action recently, it wasn’t hard to see how students come to stretch their skills. Drawing on more than 40 years of playing experience, Cheatham repeatedly prodded them, leavening his stern perfectionism with ample doses of humor.

Explaining to his trumpet section how to handle a particularly delicate passage, he told them to play as soft as”a gnat peeing on cotton.” Next time around, they moved gracefully through the quiet part.

Urging the horns to get some swing and fluidity in their playing, Cheatham advised them to, “Sing, sing through the horn!”

Like many students at the university, alto saxophonist Andy Zarling entered UCSD as a premed major. But after three years of science and math classes, during which he also studied jazz under Cheatham, Zarling decided to make music his top priority. After he graduates in June with his premed degree, he hopes to go to the prestigious Berklee School of Music in Boston.

“What I’d like to do is, once I develop consummate musicianship, I’d like to work on developing my own listenable style for the 1990s, but rooted in traditional jazz,” said Zarling, who names Johnny Hodges, Ellington’s alto sax player, as his main influence.

Zarling believes Cheatham has helped him prepare for his shot at the big time.

“Jimmy is very exacting in what he wants from you. He doesn’t tolerate a lot of BS. He appreciates it when students take the music seriously. Dedication is something he really rewards.”

Cheatham’s perfectionism flared at the recent rehearsal when pianist Loie Wheeler couldn’t get her introduction to one number quite right. Cheatham made her repeat it over and over, but Wheeler was not dismayed.

“He’s very inspirational, very intense,” she said later. “He stretches you. He never lets you rest on your laurels. If you’re good, he’ll stretch you further. If not, he’s patient, but you can’t go in and just cruise.

“He was telling the jazz improv class that when he was growing up, records weren’t available, so they listened to Count Basie and the rest on the radio, then they would sing the parts to each other. The music is just ingrained in him.”

Cheatham inherited the jazz program 13 years ago from jazz pianist and educator Cecil Lytle, now provost of Third College, who was originally hired by the university in 1974 to start a jazz program.

Until then, the jazz curriculum at UCSD had consisted mainly of guest lectures by top local musicians such as pianist Butch Lacy (now living in Copenhagen) and jazz jams and occasional classes under the direction of bassist and faculty member Bert Turetzky, who was spread thin over many musical idioms.

When Lytle arrived, he founded the gospel choir (today about 700 strong), Afro-American music history courses and a jazz band.

Before he left for a year’s sabbatical in 1978, he recruited Cheatham as his replacement. The two met as jazz players in New York City in the 1960s. They continued their friendship at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in the early 1970s, when Cheatham was on the faculty and Lytle was a student (he never took any of Cheatham’s classes).

When Lytle returned to UCSD after his year away, he said, “Jimmy had done so well that I moved into other things.” Today’s jazz program, a combination of the ensemble class, smaller improvisational workshops and jazz history courses, is essentially Cheatham’s baby.

At UCSD, there is no single jazz degree program. Music students earn degrees in performance, composition or theory.

The jazz program comes under the wing of the Music Department, and music majors take classes in several of the school’s five colleges. With its emphasis on minority and social issues, Third College--where Lytle is provost and Cheatham a lecturer--has been a major proponent of the jazz program.

At any given time, UCSD has about 100 music majors, with 25% to 30% concentrating on jazz, Lytle said. There is also a much larger group of students who don’t major in music, but who play jazz seriously and take many of the courses, he added. During a typical quarter, Cheatham has 35 to 40 students in the ensemble, and he also teaches two sections of jazz improvisation.

At this point in their careers, some jazz musicians with Cheatham’s long, illustrious track record might want to lay a little lower, maybe play an occasional gig. After all, Cheatham’s got nothing to prove.

Born in Buffalo and raised in Brooklyn, he was playing clubs near his home while still in his teens, and his musicianship matured in the 173rd Army Ground Force Band during World War II, which included drummer Jonathan (Jo) Jones. Saxophonist Lester Young, a member of the same Army division, sometimes sat in. Cheatham went on to work with Benny Carter, Gerald Wilson, Chico Hamilton, Maynard Ferguson, Jones, Foster and a host of others.

With wife Jeannie, the singer and pianist, Cheatham has co-led the critically acclaimed Sweet Baby Blues Band since 1985, and that takes a good portion of his time. But he is also committed to seeing that jazz survives through education.

“I love teaching,” said Cheatham, who first taught jazz formally in 1971 at Bennington College in Vermont. (As Cheatham pointed out, jazz musicians have passed on their secrets to younger players for years without a formal collegiate structure.) “To see students come into the bright illumination of inspiration and find out that they have the potential to make music--that’s what happened for me. I was in that type of environment, and that’s what I strive to pass on, because I was embraced by it, and in turn, I’m going to return some of it and maintain the continuity.”

During Cheatham’s formative years as a jazz player, opportunities for a solid jazz education were scarce, but Cheatham took advantage of them after the war with the help of the GI Bill.

He studied under top Big Band-era musicians including trumpeter Al Scluco, reed man Pete Mondello, pianist Tony Aless and guitarist Billy Bauer at the New York Conservatory of Modern Music in Brooklyn, graduating in 1950. He continued his academic work at Westlake College of Music in Hollywood, where he studied scoring for radio, television and films. At the time, the two institutions were among only four colleges in the country where you could get a degree in jazz, Cheatham said.

“Jazz came from the clubs, but it’s entirely different now,” he said. “Jazz didn’t get involved in education until after World War II. I was like a prototype of the professional school approach, like Berklee offers now.”

It was Cheatham’s solid background in traditional jazz that Lytle was after when he brought Cheatham to UCSD in 1978.

“We anticipated he would give our students real grounding in traditional jazz,” Lytle said. “He’s done very well, giving them a real rooting in traditional jazz, both as a performer and through the history courses.”

Now that jazz with a traditional bent is popping at UCSD under Cheatham, Lytle hopes to give students more exposure to other aspects of jazz. Experimental jazz trombonist George Lewis will join the faculty next fall, and Lytle is gradually adding new courses in contemporary jazz--he taught one himself on Miles Davis this year, and he plans to add sessions on John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk.

In the past, internationally known jazz artists have come to campus for special projects. Experimental saxophonist Anthony Braxton, for example, was commissioned to write an original piece of music five years ago, and Lytle hopes soon to commission a new work from avant-garde pianist Cecil Taylor.

The next chance to catch Cheatham and the ensemble in action will be the spring-quarter concert June 5 in the Mandeville Auditorium.